Three questions at the start of every course course
I ask these questions every time - here's why.
Planted September 05, 2025
Before I teach a single thing on any course, I always start with the same three questions. They aren’t magic but they set the tone and help me make sure that the days ahead are heading in the right direction.
1. Name & Role
I’m a human in a room, physical or virtual, teaching other humans. After introducing myself, I want to find out about the people there.
In larger organisations, this might be the first time these folks have even met each other. For me, I get a gauge of the range of experiences I can draw from, recognise teams I’ve worked with before and begin to build rapport.
I’ll scribble down a few notes and use these during examples through the course. We all love to hear our own names and I do my utmost to learn all the names in the first morning.
2. Experience
I’ll have received some of this before folks begin the training but I want to gather who has experience with the technologies or topics we’re working with. Gathering a sense of who the experts are in the room, who might need a bit more support and continuing to calibrate what I’ve planned.
There have been a few times where this has saved the course. I had arrived at a client’s office in London to delivery an Advanced React course. During pre-calls, I’d been assured of the baseline level of experience and had planned accordingly. When I asked this question though, it became clear that there were a number of participants who hadn’t built anything with React before.
I made some quick decisions, altered the direction of the course while still allowing those who needed it to dive deep into the parts of React that really interested them.
3. What will make this course a success?
This might be phrased differently but I want to make sure that we all share the same expectations for the next few days. For some, it’ll be the ability to read code that others have written and understand it. For others, it will be able to build and deploy production level applications. If I’m teaching a beginners course and it’s more of the latter, I’ll want to make a call - help them recalibrate expectations or give a few demos and notes to help them reach their goals. This question is about me calibrating my expectations of the group and them getting a richer sense of what they can expect from me.
It sounds simple but these three questions have a big impact on how each course progresses. With them, I build knowledge of the people in the room, build rapport, calibrate expectations and course content. This sets us all up for success and makes sure that, when we get to the end of our time together, we can all feel confident that we’ve achieved our goals.
